which stick to the nest ceiling. I promise to be true to you. Drones fill these cells

with royal jelly to stop the larvae from falling. Soon-to-be drones eat royal
jelly

for the first two days, while soon-to-be Josephs eat jelly for all the days to come.

I promise to be true to you! Joseph, who spends his time laying eggs inside the hive,

could live for several eons. Workers who labor during busy seasons cannot
survive as long.

When the Play Ends, We Have Learned Nothing about the Protagonist

When you say all hands on deck do you mean

that I am the deck or that I am all these hands, trying

to approximate hands. Guess how long it takes

to get from genuine to wicked. I spend / eons hanging off the mouth

of a bottle, enthralled by the fight: I swipe

two to the left cheek one

to the right, for good grace. It is only infanticide

if you finish it. Blight, there was blight

for miles & miles & an entire generation of people called

the police when they heard the noise next door.

I was lonely when you were on vacation so I touched myself thinking about

the sentence fragment. Choose your own

disappointments. Amass them in your secret place. Burn the house

of your body down. You are a faerie in plain-sight you are / dead now. Remember,

nothing I say is good enough to say

quietly. You sound like an untuned Steinway

when you let me down & every time you cum I’m in

Orion’s Belt, eating pink stars eating them up / full up eating them up. I spend /
eons

hanging off that mouth of a mouth of a mouth. Today, at the park,

I watched a kid fall off the swing. Everybody loves

the sunshine. His mother ran

to save him but he was already

growing daisies all over his body / every place daisies, in every socket.

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